The Chinese in me

America was a strange place for me who was 16 when I first got here. Luckily my family settled in the best place possible, as we lived in this melting pot or salad bowl, depending on your opinion, called San Francisco. I made friends with people from all over the world, and some of them still my best friends till today.

You may ask why I thought S.F. was the best place for me. The top reason is that it's such a friendly place for people of other ethnicity and I just love it.

I treasure the opportunities to introduce my American friends to dim sum; learn to make chai from my American brother-in-law who in term learned it from an Indian friend; self taught cooking Indian dishes from the videos recommended by my Indian co-workers.

Now I have been living in America for longer than I had been in China, the Chinese in me is still there. Through my accent, and the occasion incorrect use of words or phrases, which brought harmless laughter to my marriage. Jack is my pronunciation, grammar and spelling police, and I'm so grateful.

There were times when I felt out of place, especially in my younger days, as I had the so called identity crisis, but slowly I have learned to accept who I am. Without putting on a certain label for everything I do or say, I just go with it.

Yesterday on the drive home, Jack was explaining to me some "serious" hardware project he had been working on: putting a new 24-inch windsock on the pole at the kiteboarding site. He tried to explained to me the use of rivets.

I was like: "Can you first explain what a rivet is?"

He explained how you have this small piece of metal with a long stem and bigger on one end, which can be put through the holes of two or more pieces of thick metals, then you put a rivet gun through the rivet to press the metals together, and cut the excess stem. He said all airplane pieces were riveted together.

This morning he showed me how the whole thing works, and I finally understood.

"Oh, we just call it a nail." I said casually.

"But it's not a nail, it's a rivet." Jack protested.

"OK, it's a nail for metals." I compromised.

It's been my observation that we use Chinese language in a more relaxed way, while in English, there are very specific names for everything.

For example: we may be happy to call a bird: "a black bird" or "a big black bird", whereas you may call it a crow. Yes, we do have a name for crow, but at least I am not used to be that specific, because I couldn't tell between a crow and a raven.

Do you know what a kaleidoscope is called in Chinese? We call it: ten thousand flowers in a tube (万花筒).